I know how difficult it is to shift Miss Elder

By Alan Cochrane

12:01AM BST 03 May 2002

DIFFICULT lady is Dorothy-Grace Elder . . . I have a certain amount of sympathy this morning for John Swinney, the leader of the Scottish National Party, as he surveys the wreckage caused by her decision to resign from his party.

You see I, too, tried to discipline the great lady - and ended up with egg all over my face. A bit like he has this morning.

What happened was this: I was deputy editor of a well-known Scottish Sunday newspaper for which Miss Elder wrote a column. For most of the time it was an entirely happy arrangement and she proved extremely popular with the readers.

Unfortunately, once she had been selected as an SNP candidate the powers that be at the newspaper, including me, decided she was devoting too many column inches to petty party politics and not enough to the campaigning journalism for which she had become widely respected.

It fell to me to inform her that her services were being dispensed with. It was not a pleasant task but, as they say, somebody had to do it.

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The evil deed done, over many fags and copious quantities of white wine at Rogano's in Glasgow, I departed the scene with a heavy heart and headed back to Edinburgh.

Imagine my chagrin when I returned to my office to find that an emotional Dorothy-Grace had telephoned my, and her, boss and had been re-instated.

And just as she refused to accept that she had been sacked as a newspaper columnist then, so now she refused to accept that she was being sacked as an SNP member of the Scottish Parliament's health committee.

On the first occasion she appealed over my head, and won. This time she wasn't so lucky. When Kay Ullrich, the SNP chief whip, told her that she was being dropped from the committee Dorothy-Grace took the issue to a full party meeting and got a pasting, losing by 25 votes to one - the 'one' being herself.

But she was far from finished with them.

Yesterday, she dropped her bombshell, resigning from the party and issuing a 15-page resignation press release, complete with a potted CV and list of character witnesses, in which she lacerated her tormentors in the SNP leadership.

Showing some of the flair that made her a successful journalist she accused them of being a "remote officer class" and of "prancing around like Hyacinth Bouquet".

It all added immensely to the greater jollification of mankind, especially to those rougher elements in the press box and the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory parties.

There was great hilarity when Miss Elder just happened to draw number two at Question Time yesterday. "Gaun yersel, Dorothy," guffawed Frank McAveety, a well-known Labour hooligan, as other MSPs cheered the SNP's collective embarrassment.

And there is no doubt that in spite of the SNP's protestations last night that Dorothy-Grace will be no loss they are in for some considerable, if short-term, flak over her departure.

She may well be regarded as something of an eccentric and not much of a team player - these are the politer terms - by those on The Mound but the wider world sees her in a different light.

My own experience of working with her as a journalist is that she has an amazing knack of picking up on issues that chime with the general public and she has brought that trait with her into politics.

Although she was not popular with either the parliamentary SNP group and had differences with her local party she is a public figure in Scotland who is adept, unsurprisingly, at handling the media.

The SNP may be within its rights in removing her from the health committee but their action could be, and was, portrayed as high-handed.

Dorothy-Grace is also not the only one in the SNP to think that Nicola - henceforth to be known as Hyacinth - Sturgeon, the party's health spokesman, is less than cuddly.

It is an understatement to describe Miss Elder as a one-off and her parting of the ways with the SNP was always on the cards.

This time - and unlike my experience with her - there is no way back. The worry for Mr Swinney, however, is that he just might have created a martyr. It is a role that Dorothy-Grace would relish.